For Better for Worse

‘If you didn’t want Vanessa here you should have told Julia so,’ Marcus interrupted her, coldly.

Eleanor stared at him. ‘Marcus! How could I…?’

‘Quite easily. All you had to do was to tell Julia that it wasn’t possible for us to have Vanessa and that she would have to delay her departure until it was. As it is, you’ve agreed now and it’s too late.’

‘There wasn’t anything else I could do,’ Eleanor protested, adding sharply, ‘Perhaps if she’d been able to speak to you…’ She stopped abruptly.

What were they doing? What was happening to them lately? There seemed to be so much tension in their relationship, so much irritation. And it wasn’t just caused by Vanessa’s unexpected and unwanted visit.

There had been a growing distance between them recently, a growing feeling on her part of having to cope with things on her own, of Marcus somehow detaching himself from the myriad irritating problems that continued to spring up over their house move, so that she felt increasingly isolated from him and increasingly resentful about his lack of awareness of the pressure she was under.

She had been looking forward to a few days on their own; looking forward to having time to discuss then-plans for the house, to even perhaps persuading him to take some time off and go down there with her.

It irked her that Marcus seemed to think that she was at fault for agreeing to have Vanessa. What else could she have done, faced with the relentless pressure from Julia?

In the end she had to ring her ex-in-laws and ask if it was possible for them to pick up the boys on Friday. Luckily it was. She then had to work until gone midnight on Thursday evening—the only evening of the week when Marcus managed to get home early—in order to finish a translation she had promised a client for Friday, so that on Friday she could spend the day getting the boys’ things ready, and then preparing their room for Vanessa and her friend.

When the architect rang halfway through Friday afternoon to announce that he n

eeded to meet her at the house the following week to discuss several things with her she did some mental calculations with her schedule, acknowledging to herself that the only way she could do so would be if she were to take Vanessa and her friend with her.

Which might not be a bad idea, she told herself when she replaced the receiver. It would give Vanessa a chance to see the house for herself and Eleanor was convinced that once she had seen it she would stop being so difficult about the move.

Vanessa, the boys, and even it sometimes seemed Marcus himself to some extent… why couldn’t they see and appreciate what she was trying to do?

That evening, as she waved the boys off, she told herself that it was ridiculous to feel hurt by the excited eagerness with which they had greeted their grandparents.

She had told them about Vanessa’s visit but Tom had simply shrugged and said that he didn’t care.

‘Grandad is going to build a new garden shed and we’re going to help him,’ he had added excitedly. ‘He wrote to me and told me.’

It was later than she had expected when Marcus returned with the two girls, and as the three of them walked into the hall and Eleanor saw Vanessa’s friend her heart sank.

The other girl looked at least two years older than Vanessa and far more sophisticated, her face covered in thick pale make-up, her eyes outlined in dark kohl and her lips a vivid pouting scarlet. The eyes between the thickly mascaraed lashes were surely far too knowing and cynical for a girl of her age, and the short skirt and tight-fitting skimpy top, like the body they barely covered, so blatantly sexual that Eleanor felt not so much shocked by them as somehow slightly intimidated and embarrassed.

And the girl seemed to know it too. The look she gave Eleanor was both challenging and hostile, causing Eleanor’s heart to sink even further. Did Julia honestly believe that this girl was a suitable friend for someone as impressionable as Vanessa?

Marcus, who had walked into the hall behind the girls, looked irritable and tense. As he put down their cases Vanessa’s friend turned and sidled up to him, smiling archly at him as she thanked him.

‘Come on, Sasha. My room’s this way,’ Vanessa announced, totally ignoring Eleanor as she headed for the stairs. After another lingeringly sexual look at Marcus the other girl followed.

‘Don’t say a word,’ Marcus warned her as the bedroom door closed behind them. ‘Just remember this was your idea, not mine.’

She was too tired to argue with him and point out to him that all she had done was take his ex-wife’s phone call. Eleanor still felt both angry and hurt.

The weekend was a nightmare, culminating in Vanessa’s locking herself in her bedroom, playing music so loudly that Eleanor felt as though the whole fabric of the house was shaking with it, when she was forbidden to accompany her friend to a nightclub the other girl apparently knew.

In the end Sasha announced that since Vanessa had to stay in she might as well stay with her. She seemed more condescendingly amused by them than anything else, Eleanor recognised. From odd comments she made it became clear that she had only recently moved to Vanessa’s school and that she was living in a foster home.

‘It was Mum’s new fella. She didn’t like the fact that he fancied me so she got the council to take me. Said I was getting out of control.’ She had shrugged, apparently unconcerned, leaving Eleanor to question just how much Julia knew about her daughter’s new friend.

By Monday morning, Eleanor didn’t know how on earth she was going to get through the week.

The combination of Vanessa’s sullen defiance and Sasha’s aggressive sexuality were beginning to wear her nerves as raw as sandpaper on fine skin.

On Monday, when Eleanor announced that she had to meet the architect at the house and that she intended taking them with her, Vanessa immediately objected.

‘We’re not children, you know,’ she told Eleanor bitterly. ‘We don’t need you standing over us all day long like a guard dog.’